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The Palestinian September to Remember

Turning to friends in high places at the UN.

The Palestinians are reportedly preparing to present their bid for United Nations membership on September 20, 2011, with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas personally presenting the request to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The request will come two days before the UN-hosted hatefest known as Durban III, where the misnamed "UN World Conference Against Racism" will be used to reaffirm the UN's previous defamation of Israel as a "racist" state.

Under UN protocol, Ban Ki-moon is expected to submit the Palestinian request to the Security Council, which must recommend UN membership for an independent Palestinian state before the General Assembly can pass a resolution with any legally binding effect.

Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki indicated that the Palestinian Authority chose September for its bid because Lebanon, whose government is now controlled by the terrorist organization Hezbollah and tilts towards Syria and Iran, holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council. Lebanon will use its position to turn the Security Council into a public platform for the Palestinians to exploit, attempting to pressure the United States into abstaining rather than exercising its veto power.

Assuming that the Obama administration does not cave to Islamist pressure and carries out its veto threat, the Palestinians will almost certainly seek a vote in the General Assembly anyway for recognition as an independent (albeit non-UN member) state. Such status may be enough to allow the Palestinians to join various UN agencies such as UNESCO and UNICEF.

The Palestinians will get help from their friends in high places in the General Assembly. Qatar will hold the presidency of the General Assembly beginning this September, and Iran will hold one of the vice presidencies.

After 63 years, the Palestinians are trying to get the UN to turn back the clock to the original two-state solution they could have had, but rejected, in 1948. For 20 more years until the 1967 Six Day War, the Palestinians could have asked their fellow Palestinian-majority state, Jordan, to give up the West Bank and the portion of Jerusalem that Jordan controlled to create a contiguous independent Palestinian state. There were no Jewish settlements to speak of. There was no security fence. In fact, there was no Israeli presence to stop the Palestinians from creating an independent state if Jordan and the other Arab states would have supported them. But the Palestinian terrorist leaders and their "friends" in the Arab world continued to reject a peaceful resolution based on a two-state solution. They continued to press for the elimination of the Jewish State altogether.

Little has changed, as Palestinians try to change history and cast themselves as innocent victims of "Zionist racism" and "apartheid," rather than take responsibility for their own failures. When Abbas decided to reconcile with the terrorist Hamas organization and form a unity government, he affirmed an alliance with a group whose covenant calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of all Jews everywhere. Abbas refuses to consider the one simple concession that will open up a path to a negotiated peace and an independent Palestinian state: recognizing that Israel has as much a right to exist in peace as a Jewish state as its neighbors (including a new Palestinian state) have the right to exist in peace as Islamic states. Moreover, if the Palestinians expect Israel to risk its security by returning to the pre-1967 lines as the basis for negotiations, then the Palestinians must give up their fanciful claim of "right of return" to areas within pre-1967 Israel.

The Palestinians who demand the right of return to all of the land encompassing even pre-1967 Israel are simply trying to steal what does not belong to them. So-called "Palestine" belonged for centuries to the non-Arab Turks from whom Jews purchased large tracts of land and developed it. The truth is that Egyptians and other Arabs from Syria, Yemen and Trans-Jordan migrated from neighboring areas into the Palestine territory. They were not an indigenous population. Indeed, one of the most important Arab migrations into Palestine came from Egypt during the early and mid-nineteenth century, not much before the beginning of significant Jewish migration, which added to the continued Jewish presence in the Holy Land that has existed for more than three thousand years. To say that Arab non-Jewish migrants have any greater claims to all of the land into which they migrated, to the exclusion of Jewish migrants of various ethnic backgrounds who also settled there to join their fellow Jews, demonstrates the same strain of Arab racism that shows up today in Sudan, where the Arab rulers are slaughtering the black population.

Nor do the Palestinians have any legitimate claim to what they call East Jerusalem, which Jordan had seized illegally in 1948 after the Arabs tried to destroy the new Jewish State. This portion of Jerusalem includes Jerusalem's Old City and some of the holiest sites of Judaism.

There has been no Muslim majority in Jerusalem based on records going as far back as 1844 (referencing Ottoman census figures) through 1945 (referencing British Mandate census and Anglo-American survey data) and continuing through today, which would justify its artificial division. Indeed, we know what happens when Arab Muslims take control of areas containing other religions' sanctuaries. They often destroy them. When the Jordanians controlled Old Jerusalem, for example, they desecrated Jewish holy sites. The idea of an East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem divide is no more legitimate than was an East Berlin/West Berlin divide.

The Palestinian victimhood narrative is built on a tissue of lies. This September at the United Nations promises to be more of the same. Any United Nations body that recognizes the Palestinians' unilateral claim to independent statehood without a negotiated settlement and allows full Palestinian participation should not receive another dollar of U.S. financial support.